Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/116

82 named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the Scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.

My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself, and how to make others so.

Even to the Homeopathic physician who attended me, and rejoiced in my recovery, I could not then explain the modus of my relief. I could only assure him that the Divine Spirit had wrought the miracle—a miracle which later I found to be in perfect Scientific accord with divine law.

In a sketch of Mrs. Eddy, published by the Christian Science Publishing Society, still a later version is given:

In company with her husband, she was returning from an errand of mercy, when she fell upon the icy curbstone, and was carried helpless to her home. The skilled physicians declared that there was absolutely no hope for her, and pronounced the verdict that she had but three days to live. Finding no hope and no help on earth, she lifted her heart to God. On the third day, calling for her Bible, she asked the family to leave the room. Her Bible opened to the healing of the palsied man, Matt, ix, 2. The truth which set him free, she saw. The power which gave him strength, she felt. The life divine, which healed the sick of the palsy, restored her, and she rose from the bed of pain, healed and free.

Several documents can be brought in refutation of this claim. Mrs. Eddy's own letter to Julius A. Dresser, after the death of Quimby, apparently disproves the miraculous account given above. This letter, already quoted in full in the preceding chapter, contains the first recorded reference to this accident:

Two weeks ago I fell on the sidewalk (writes Mrs. Eddy), and struck my back on the ice, and was taken up for dead, came to consciousness amid a storm of vapours from cologne, chloroform, ether, camphor, etc., but to find myself the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby.